The two operators brought elevators to the eighth floor, and young women fought to get on. Each car made fifteen or twenty trips, carrying passengers to street level -- their clothes smoldering. The smoke was so thick the operators opened the doors by guesswork. Finally, one track bent in the heat and the cab couldn't move past the eighth floor; the other stopped altogether.
On the ninth and tenth floors, some women finally managed to open the stairway doors and race downstairs -- most of them with their clothing burned almost completely from their bodies. Others flung themselves down the elevator shaft or tried to slide down the cables, only to lose their grip. "Their bodies rained blood and coins down onto [those] who made it into the elevator cars." Elevator operator Joseph Zito heard bodies hitting the roof of his car and watched as coins fell from pay envelopes and rolled through the grating. Police later found twenty-five charred bodies on top of the elevator cars.
The building had only one fire escape, and that ended five feet above the ground. It quickly collapsed, and "as the fire-crazed victims were thrown by the collapse of the fire escape," noted the New York Herald, "several stuck on the sharp-tipped palings. The body of one woman was found with several iron spikes driven entirely through it."
Three men formed a human chain from the eighth-floor window to an adjacent window next door, and some women were able to cross over on their backs. But then, the men lost their balance and fell eighty feet to the pavement below.
On the tenth floor, workers first received word of the fire over a teleautograph that relayed messages between floors. Many realized they could not go down, so they climbed onto the roof. Students from New York University Law School lowered a ladder to the Asch Building, which was about 12 feet below. Almost 150 workers reached safety that way.
When Engine Company 33 arrived, firefighters found that water from their hoses would reach only as far as the seventh floor, and the aerial ladders reached only to between the sixth and seventh floors. Some women tried to jump to the ladders. A few succeeded; most dove to their deaths.
The crowd called for those on the ledges to wait for safety nets. But the nets were useless. When three women jumped into one net, they catapulted the firemen off their feet; the women died. Again, when firefighters attempted to catch one girl in a safety net, three more hurled themselves immediately after her; all four bounced out and hit the concrete. A policeman and fireman held a horse blanket and tried to catch the next hurling body. The blanket split in two and the body hit the pavement. One fire captain estimated that each falling body carried 11,000 pounds of force.
